Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, and Blogging!

First off, I swear this isn’t a crime, while I may be posting to Linux development planets from Windows Vista, I have a good excuse.

I didn’t have to pay! Well… sort of. Perhaps the greatest benefit of being a University student is that you tend to get lots of cool site-licensed software, for free! (Yes, I am well aware my tuition is paying for it, but its more fun this way). As a result, I grabbed a copy of my new favorite Open Source Virtualization Solution at www.virtualbox.org, and away I went!

I have another confession to make, this post is being composed in the new Word 2007, which raises the bar for blogging software everywhere.

Now that I have all that out of my system, lets play the ‘Cool new features and stuff’ game. As far as Vista itself goes, it looks cool, the Control Panel has been overhauled, along with a bunch of other administrative interfaces, but in the end, it’s nothing mind-altering on the UI side, just solid, tried and true. Office 2007 on the other hand is a whole different story. I would like to think the growing and serious interest in Openoffice.org was what kicked Microsoft off of its proverbial ass to give us something truly new and, if I may say so, incredible.

After several lackluster hours of playing around with Vista, my Office 2007 was just wrapping up its download/install, and my hopes were pretty low, after all, Vista was a cool new skin, with some fun features, but nothing really useful so far. As soon as I opened up Word, I knew I had underestimated the worlds most powerful and influential software giant. Word still has that white space in the middle of the screen where you type, but most of what we knew of Office 2003 ends there. The entire toolbar/formatting system has been radically redesigned, eager to give it a whirl; I almost jumped at the next serious paper I had to write. While there was some confusion at first, I quickly started to like the new system, so much so that I have serious concerns about my ability to return to Oo.org. I don’t have the time, energy, or general willpower to write up another review, there are literally hundreds out there, go read one of them, but what I will say, is we have a learning experience here. I’m not advocating we start copying stuff, but I think Office’s new streamlined system is a great example of keeping the information most relevant and needed close at hand.

Now, If I were a millionaire, we could donate copies so everyone could try it out, but just so, that’s not my luck, however if you have a chance to try out the new Office, do so, it’s a trip.

Note: I started playing with the new Outlook as well, its changes were more mild, but still, there are some cool new UI components/features that are worth looking at, but I don’t want to make up my mind on that until I’ve used it a little longer.

Distributed Revision Control and Gnome

As pretty much everyone knows at this point, Gnome has migrated to Subversion for all of our source code management. As many subscribers to gnome-hackers are aware, a few hours before the twice delayed migration was about to start, a serious discussion arose debating the merits of a distributed RCS as opposed to our traditional centralized system.

Now, I am not against solid debate, but given the circumstances, I thought it was a little stupid, as Ross had already poured hours into working out the nuances of cvs2svn so that we could have a smooth transition.

SVK
That being said, I am a fan of distributed revision control, I feel more at liberty to experiment and be creative when I’m not messing up someone else’s system. Branches make more sense to me than patch’s, and my tendency to work wirelessly can make little things like checking commit logs a major pain, or even simple diffs. As a result, I have grown fond of both git and bzr, basically for the opposite reasons. But in my infatuation, I started to experiment and play around a little with the new SVN server, and found that enjoying the powerful merging tools of a Distributed RCS can still happen, even with a centralized server like we have.

My first sample is probably the most obvious, but also the least out there. If your new to the idea behind distributed revision control, this is a great first step. I’m talking about SVK, its a small set of wrapper scripts around Subversion that are conducive to developers maintaining a local copy of the source tree and its history, with generally just one local branch. Unlike something like git, this is meant to provide the developer with the speed benefits of a distributed system, as well as some simple local branching (and of course, complete compatibility with Subversion.)
The true beauty of SVK is its unobtrusive nature, no requests to crazed Sysadmins, no major restructuring of development habits, its more or less seamless. There is a great article in the SVK Wiki covering how to use SVK as a SVN mirror, but to give everyone an Idea of how easy it is.
Now, say I want to mirror gtk+, the steps go just like this:

svk mirror svn+ssh://kkubasik@svn.gnome.org/svn/gtk+/trunk //mirror/gtk+
svk sync //mirror/gtk+
svk cp //mirror/gtk+ //local/gtk+
mkdir ./kevins-gtk+
cd ./kevins-gtk+
svk co //local/gtk+

And that’s it! The thing that makes SVK noteworthy is its speedy integration with Subversion, and its simple nature. Most users just keep a ‘Mirror’ branch and a ‘Local’ branch, once you’ve finished what you wanted to, you just merge those branches, then push!

Bazaar-ng
Next I want to cover Bazaar-ng and its svn plug-in. Bazaar-ng (or bzr as its more commonly known) was created for the user who wants a more user friendly and comprehensive interface. Bzr is written and python, and compared to most other distributed systems, down right slow. But bzr is quick to make up the lost ground by supporting dozens of transfer protocols, including most centralized SCM systems. In addition, bzr possesses an incredibly versatile plug-in system, which the community has taken advantage of. This also makes bzr the first mainstream source code management solution that has a functional, incorporated, and incredibly useful Gui. (provided by the bzr-gtk plug-in for anyone who was wondering).
However, to summarize, bzr interacts well with subversion, treating it as any other branch, merging, pulling and committing, so should your project be looking for a more distributed feel without completely abandoning the translators and doc authors, they could still easily work out of subversion, with the developers merging with the central sever a couple of times a week.
Bzr is tough, for lack of a better description, its really fun to play with for a while, but it loses that novelty somewhat fast, as the long times (especially with the svn backends) start to pile up.

A Breif Moment of Git
Finally I wanted to cover the holies of holies, that’s right, git. In all honesty, I’m not sure what I could say about Git to anyone, it seems that everyone already has a strong opinion. Git is a great system, i have never once questioned the efficiency with which it does what it does. Git is fast, git is reliable, and its already proven itself in the ultimate stress test, since I’ve seen several posts about git over the past few days, I’ll keep this part shorter despite my fascination with git.
As some of you may know, git 1.4 ships with a handy little application called git-svn, which basically lets you use a powerful distributed system, where the SVN server is your sharing point.

Beagle Shining, The Holidays, and Playlists on My iPod

I just stumbled across a little blog post that made me more than a little happy. Christer Edwards had a short, but flattering post on Planet Ubuntu.

I’ve been so lazy thanks to the holidays that I didn’t even notice how completely disconnected I had been from the greater Gnome community. So, hello everyone, I’m back!

Now I’ve been busy messing around the past few hours with some major bug triaging efforts over on launchpad. It seems that just around the holidays there was an enormous flood of poorly filed bugs in launchpad, so I’m mucking around the beagle section, trying to tidy things up a bit. However, on a more exciting note, I have been working

I’ve also been trying to close the notorious Bug# 321742 which provides synchronizing play list support for Dap devices in Banshee (specifically the iPod ). Thanks to a great hackfest a few weeks ago, the infrastructure we need is in place, now its just the nitty gritty of each device. I seem to have volunteered for the iPod. So, heres the latest patch and all that jazz.

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Tags: banshee, mono, beagle, linux, gnome